Integrated approach to the design of wind farm infrastructure

A part of the wind farm layout optimization is the design of the wind farm infrastructure, that includes roads and the electrical collector system. The cost of the wind farm infrastructure is a minor part of the total cost. However, its variability with different layouts influences the optimal layout of the wind farm. The aim of this paper is to develop a realistic model for the wind farm infrastructure and propose a fast algorithm for solving the problem. First, the road layout is found using the Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm, considering the existing roads. After that, the collector system is optimized using metaheuristic Cuckoo Search algorithm, taking into account information about previously found road layout and the lifetime costs of the cables, power losses and outages. A Genetic algorithm is used as a benchmark for comparing the performance of the Cuckoo Search algorithm.